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f415d10
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Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy." Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it. Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over."
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Arundhati Roy |
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8bc2ae9
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The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
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dream
reality
living
death
life
existing
truths
carpe-diem
life-and-death
dead
dying
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Arundhati Roy |
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b4e6a40
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Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.
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fiction
friends
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Arundhati Roy |
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8516492
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Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
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Arundhati Roy |
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1f0b708
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Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left ..
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Arundhati Roy |
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8930de8
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By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
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Arundhati Roy |
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80bcc37
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When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
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Arundhati Roy |
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e99c186
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She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
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love
the-god-of-small-things
self-acceptance
self-love
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Arundhati Roy |
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c223c2c
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It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefull..
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Arundhati Roy |
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0738580
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With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.
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Arundhati Roy |
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c63a01c
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Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.
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Arundhati Roy |
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325252e
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Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
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fiction
goodbye
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Arundhati Roy |
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233c81f
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She knew he'd be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
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Arundhati Roy |
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b4bd1dd
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Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them-- just as an education, a precaution.
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Arundhati Roy |
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82454b8
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At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
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human-rights
india
equality
women
reality
truth
inspirational
environmental-degradation
false-gods
narmada-valley
dam
government-corruption
corporations
nationalism
economics
government
capitalism
exploitation
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Arundhati Roy |
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52bef2d
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Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.
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Arundhati Roy |
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952bf00
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When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted he..
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Arundhati Roy |
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a6bf726
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May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
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Arundhati Roy |
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2577c80
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Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
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Arundhati Roy |
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1c704c5
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Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just been discovered?
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Arundhati Roy |
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2014c60
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Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
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thoughts
love
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Arundhati Roy |
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989eb2f
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It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.
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hegemony
roy
empire
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Arundhati Roy |
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dc8d582
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It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. W..
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madness
humanity
fear
truth
colonizer
nuclear-threat
nuclear-bomb
whiteness
folly
white
nuclear-weapons
danger
humans
mind-control
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Arundhati Roy |
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2878e52
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Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.
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Arundhati Roy |
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b2677ed
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Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.
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Arundhati Roy |
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0deddc5
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They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.
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Arundhati Roy |
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fbd2e55
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Humans are animals of habit.
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Arundhati Roy |
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9553824
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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
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Arundhati Roy |
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474e624
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The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the kee..
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Arundhati Roy |
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d0c913b
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Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology. The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely -- but shall we say inaccurately -- define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride. What does the term 'anti-American' m..
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Arundhati Roy |
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ebd95c4
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Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat--they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the sam..
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Arundhati Roy |
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5a03cff
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The US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands and, following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. 'Stolen from Africa, brought to America' - Bob Marley's 'Buffalo Soldier' contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadn..
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Arundhati Roy |